We all need fantasies to be sure, but fantasies need to be considered with caution - and knowledge. As tigerrouge points out - by all means, look at magazines and enjoy them, but be realistic about them - those are not how people really look.

For example, fantasy won't overrule reality if, say, one of those teetering girls I saw on the street needed to run from someone. I saw one girl who was heavily under the influence of alcohol, and the lad with her was kindly helping her. But she was falling down on the street, her skirt was rising up, her underwear was exposed; it was totally embarrassing and sad. And what if the lad with her wasn't being so nice? She'd have little-to-no way to defend herself, even if she hadn't been drinking.

Women, and people generally, need to be smart about their fantasies. Overruling reality isn't always safe or wise.

If wearing stilettos, you can always take one off and use it as a weapon

Recently I watched a video of Miuccia Prada on Charlie Rose talking about wearing fashion to feminist gatherings and being active in the women's movement. I found this quite interesting giving the outrage here at her last collection harking back to the 50s. I think it's possible to do that in an ironic way--I've done it myself. Probably no one got it--I guess I was dressing for myself

__________________There's a need for more individuality today, and my job is to cater to women, not dictate to them. --Alber Elbaz

Does Fashion fetishize the Female Corpse!? Makes me think of that infamous Edgar Allan Poe quotation that goes something like this: "the most poetic subject in the world is the death of a beautiful woman"...

Quote:

How female corpses became a fashion trend
Beautiful women posed as dead bodies are an advertising campaign staple, including the new Marc Jacobs shoot starring Miley Cyrus. Why does fashion fetishise the female corpse?

For once it's not the image of Miley Cyrus herself that is controversial. It's the woman lying next to her. In a new advertising campaign for Marc Jacobs, Miley and two female models pose on a moonlit beach, Miley sitting up, staring moodily into the middle distance, a woman standing behind her, while another lies on the sand. This model isn't reclining happily, or curled up asleep; she is flat on her back, hair partially covering her face, with the stiff, sightless demeanour of a body in the morgue. A beautifully dressed one, of course.

This ad campaign was released a day after the latest cover of US magazine Entertainment Weekly, which shows the two stars of upcoming film Gone Girl lying on a gurney. Ben Affleck is fully dressed and alert, curled awkwardly around Rosamund Pike, who is in a bra and slip, pale, wide-eyed with surprise, very much dead. A tag is tied carefully around her toe.

This isn't the first time dead women have been used in fashion or entertainment, of course. Over the years female corpses, especially beautiful female corpses, have become a staple of fashion shoots, advertising campaigns and TV shows – with sexual and fatal violence against women a favourite of TV programmes looking to boost a waning audience or build a new one.

Last year Vice magazine decided to illustrate their Women in Fiction issue with a fashion shoot depicting a range of well-known writers in the throes of killing themselves, or trying to: Sylvia Plath kneeling in front of an oven; Virginia Woolf standing in a stream, clutching a large stone; Dorothy Parker bleeding heavily into a sink. The fashion credits were included in full, down to the pair of tights used as a noose.

A 2006 Jimmy Choo ad showed a woman apparently passed out in a car boot, a man in dark glasses sitting beside her, brandishing a spade. In 2007 W magazine ran a fashion story featuring model Doutzen Kroes that ticked every box of objectification – multiple images of her seemingly passed out, semi-naked; one in which her lifeless hand held a teddy bear.

That same year, America's Next Top Model illustrated this trend with an episode in which the contestants had to pose as if they'd just been killed. This prompted surreal comments from the judges. One woman, posed as if she'd just been brutally stabbed, was criticised for not looking dead enough. Another, posed as if she had fallen from a tall building, was told "death becomes you, young lady". Still another, covered in deep bruises at the bottom of a flight of stairs, was told: "the look on your face is just extraordinary. Very beautiful and dead." The show could hardly have gone further in illustrating fashion's fetishisation of the female corpse.

This obsession with death isn't so surprising, when you consider it as the obvious and ultimate end point of a spectrum in which women's passivity and silence is sexualised, stylised and highly saleable. Over the past few years, there have been a number of brilliant projects that have shown the eye-popping strangeness of how women are posed for the camera, contorted into positions which make them look simultaneously ridiculous, weak, sexually available and highly vulnerable.

In 2011, for instance, Spanish artist Yolanda Domínguez created Poses, a project in which ordinary women reproduced model poses in everyday settings. One reclined awkwardly in a flower bed; another stood on the street, legs apart, bent forward, sucking her fingers; another posed, hip cocked, a clutch bag held dramatically to her forehead. People all around them gawped and did double takes.

Last year, a Swedish project showed the difference between the way men and women are posed in the notoriously creepy American Apparel ads, with a man gamely copying some of the female poses favoured by the company. Suddenly the incredible weirdness of a woman crouched on all fours, naked from the waist down, back arched to show off a denim shirt was completely clear.

A similarly effective gender swap was carried out by cartoonist Kevin Bolk, who decided to transform an Avengers poster so that all the men were posed as the one female character, played by Scarlett Johansson, had been on the genuine poster. The male characters immediately went from looking active, engaged and ready to defend themselves to being little more than display vehicles for their own buttocks.

Do people actually want these images? Do they want violence against women to be sexualised? There are some strong signs that they don't, from all the women who speak out against these images (Vice magazine ended up apologising and removing their fashion spread from the web as a result), to the news item, published last week, which showed that films that pass the Bechdel test – which offer at least two female characters, who have a conversation, about something other than a man –outperform their counterparts at the box office. Last year, of the 50 highest-grossing films in the US, those that passed the Bechdel test earned $176m at the box office, while those that didn't averaged $116m.

Still, there's a reason these images proliferate. If the sexualised stereotype of a woman in our culture is passive and vulnerable, the advertising industry has worked out that, taken to its logical conclusion, there is nothing more alluring than a dead girl.

Source: The Guardian.com

__________________Fashion: Don’t you recognize me? Death: You should know that I don’t see very well and I can’t wear glasses. Fashion: I’m Fashion, your sister. Death: My sister? Fashion: Yes. You and I together keep undoing and changing things down here on earth although you go about it in one way and I another. Giacomo Leopardi, “Dialogue Between Fashion and Death.”abridged

I'm glad others are starting to notice. This is the very reason I canceled my subscription to W years ago. I really, really hate these types of fashion spreads (as well as the shots I see from them around tFS used as avatars). I find them unbelievably creepy.

__________________There's a need for more individuality today, and my job is to cater to women, not dictate to them. --Alber Elbaz

I personally believe that we(humans) dont dress for ourselves, generally speaking, but feminism is about what do you want to do, whether that is dressing for your cat, man or whatever. If some girl feels confident about attracting guys with her looks, why cant she be a feminist?
We tend to look things only from our perspective and basically we, claiming that we are feminists, tell people what to do and how to act and how to dress, which is not a feminism.

This video is very important and answers many of our questions regarding the objectification of women in media.

The way I see it is this: I personally strongly believe also that what a grown, free woman knowingly does with her body and image is her choice. In an ideal world. However, realistically and very unfortunately, we do not live in an ideal world. We live in a world where the vast majority of men (and women) expect women and girls to be subordinate objects. This is the root cause of violence against women. That's why we have to be very careful and responsible about how, when, where, and in what context to perpetrate images of women (including ourselves) being objectified. The world is totally not yet ready for complete freedom of expression, in the name of art, freedom, irony, or whatever. One day, I hope it will be. But until then our priorities must be protecting our children and educating ourselves and the world, or we are part of the problem. I want feminism to be a responsible and mature cause, not an excuse to do whatever the hell we want because guys-have-been-doing-it-so-why-can't-we.

It may be that not everyone is capable of making evolved choices. My belief is that I have to be ready to allow others to make their own choices, while being quite cautious about judging those choices. However, I think there's no denying that some choices are more evolved than others.

__________________There's a need for more individuality today, and my job is to cater to women, not dictate to them. --Alber Elbaz

It may be that not everyone is capable of making evolved choices. My belief is that I have to be ready to allow others to make their own choices, while being quite cautious about judging those choices. However, I think there's no denying that some choices are more evolved than others.

Yes, it is very complex, and very difficult/risky to judge. We more often than not have no way of getting into the motivations of the persons involved in creating a given image, often their greater body of work and what they stand for. But I agree with Caroline Heldman in that when I was growing up in the 80's we read John Berger's Ways of Seeing and talked about the portrayal of women in the media and we got what it was all about. Now I see young girls having far, far less authority over their own bodies without even realizing it, and wonder what is going on. There's the phenomenon of all the pink and sexualized little girls' toys as well. Not sure things are going in a good direction, and wonder what can be done about it.

Not reality. And that's the beauty of it. That's what gives us that magical feeling when we pour over the pages of Vogue, when we see the most beautiful vision dreamed up by designers and hairdressers and makeup artists, when we watch shows.

We make the choices for how we wish to dress and represent ourselves, and we as buyers have the ultimate power. Fashion just provides us with endless options for how we wish to dress and portray ourselves.

We would not look to movies, and see "they are glamourizing corpses!" ~ the corpse would be there as part of the story, part of that "world" the artist is involving in his / her story. The same is true for fashion.

^ Eventually we all have to get dressed, though, and participate in reality fully clothed, and fashion determines what we wear. There are choices, but there are limits to those choices. (Yes, one could opt out of ready to wear, but I don't consider that a practical choice for me or probably most people.)

__________________There's a need for more individuality today, and my job is to cater to women, not dictate to them. --Alber Elbaz

Well In my opinion fashion is just an indutry that makes what the buyer wants, sites as WGSN stylesight or WWD work hard to make a study of what people needs and then the designers (famous and not famous, and retail brands)do that according to thwat people asks for, so then they are gonna buy it, so in fact the main fashion influencer is the buyer.

People place fashion above criticism far too often by saying it's a fantasy, but it's actually an industry selling a fantasy. I don't think it's unfair to ask where those fantasies come from or what they promote.

^ I agree. Particularly considering that we're being asked to buy in, and almost have no choice about doing so (we have to be clothed, and most of us aren't willing to either make all our own patterns and clothes, or shop exclusively on the secondary market).

__________________There's a need for more individuality today, and my job is to cater to women, not dictate to them. --Alber Elbaz